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Becoming a SharePoint Convert

SharePoint has always been in my peripheral vision, but never a tool that I actually used. We're in the middle of an investigation project to look at putting up an enterprise instance of it. I watched the Lynda.com intro training for SharePoint 2010 and I have to say that I'm quite impressed with how far SharePoint has come since my first introduction to it.

It is sporting the ribbon interface from the Office applications that I've come to like very much. The ability to keep calendars, task lists, and even documents synchronized with Outlook is awesome.

I wish it was a little more straightforward to save a document from Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel in to your SharePoint work space for the first time. Right now, the interface feels a little broken to me. You click the button to browse for a SharePoint location to save, and word does absolutely nothing. You click the button again, and it still does nothing. It turns out that you have to click the SharePoint button, and then you have to click the save as button to get prompted for location to save. Then there is no way to browse to a SharePoint site. You have to paste in the URL for your SharePoint site.

Even with the small quirks, it still looks like a promising candidate to replace eRoom, a tool that EMC is no longer going to be supporting. I think it will be great for users to be able to create collaborative sites and workspaces on the fly that will really be cool for teams, both ad hoc and standing.

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